For US customers, TMO is the next closest (and is the carrier partner Fi uses for international roaming anyway). The catch is that TMO's ONE service plan throttles 'free' international usage to 2G speeds. Fi on the other hand does not.

That "catch" is such a big difference in practice that it makes TMO a totally different (worse) thing.

And no other carrier offers up to 9 additional data only SIMs on the same plan without additional charges.

This is by far the thing I miss most about Fi, and I'm shocked that no other carrier so far has replicated the feature.

It’s because people will figure out that they don’t need voice services st all...

That's not a problem if you follow the Fi billing model: a base payment for voice and SMS/MMS service is always required to keep the account active. Data is billed separately.

The thing is that I’m sure there are plenty of families on Fi who don’t have phone numbers for anyone but the primary account holder and rely on voip.

Because they charge by the byte, rather that the sim card. I find it hard to believe that is a generally useful feature unless you happen to have a network of IoT devices with 100MB of data usage a month.

Whatever you do, don't give one of those sim cards to my kids, which somehow manage to burn multiple GB a month each with the occasional music/youtube video in the car/whatever when they are away from the home/school/etc wifi.

Same here. I am actually an AT&T customer and the $10/day for international roaming is nice as a backup but for the most part I just use my wife's Fi data SIM and pay a lot less.

I traveled to India in 2017 and 2018. I had problems getting HSPA+ most of the time. Had no problems with local carriers.

In Mumbai right now. Full LTE. I did a speed test today for fun and got 25mbps down and 5 up.

Last night on the way to some mall we took a route though some sort of jungle dairy farm. Both of the locals had no signal when about half way through traffic stopped ( except for the masses of motor bikes, they just keep comming ). I was the only one able to pull it Google maps and check how far up thr road the traffic was.

Maybe Mumbai is set up better for Fi? What parts were you in ?

Also. The main post here should be about Google payments, not Fi.